CHAPTER II
The sea lay below, far below, and stretching like a sapphire meadow to the rim of the world.
You could hear the song of the breakers in the cave and on the sand and the cry of the seagulls from the cliff and rock, and the breeze amid the cliff grass, but these sounds only emphasised the silence of the great sunlit sapphire sea.
The sea is a very silent thing. Three thousand miles of pampas grass would emit more sound under the lash of the wind than the whole Atlantic Ocean, and a swallow in its flight makes more sound than the forty-foot wave, that can wreck a pier or break a ship, makes in its passage towards the shore.
Up here, far above the shore, the faint, sonorous tune of wave upon wave breaking upon the sands below served only to accentuate the essential silence of the sea.
Through this sound could be distinguished another, immense, faint, dream-like—the breathing of leagues of coast; a sound made up of the boom of billows in the sea caves, and the bursting of waves on rock and strand, but so indefinite, so vague, that, listening, one sometimes fancied it to be the wind in the bent grass, or a whisper from the stunted firs on the landward side of the cliff.
Away out on the sparkling blue, the brown sails of fisher boats bound for Bellturbet filled to the light wind, and a mile out from shore, and stretching south-westward, the Seven Sisters rocks broke from the sea. That was all. But it was immensely beautiful.
Nowhere else perhaps can you get such loneliness as here, on the west coast of Ireland—loneliness without utter desolation. The vast shore, left just as the gods hewed it in the making of the world, lies facing the immense sea. They tell each other things. You can hear the billow talking to the cave, and the cave to the billow, and the wind to the cliff, and the wave to the rock, and the gulls lamenting. And you know that it was all like this a thousand years and more ago, when Machdum set his sails to the wind and headed his ship for the island.
Moriarty, leaving the donkey to nibble at the scant grass on the cliff top, took his seat on the ground and began to cut a split out of the blackthorn stick, while Miss French, with the reins in her hands, looked about her and over the sea.
She could see a white ring round the base of each of the Seven Sisters rocks; it was a ring of foam, for, placid though the sea looked from these heights, a dangerous swell was running. Now and then, like a puff of smoke, a ring of seagulls would burst out from the rocks, contract, dissolve, and vanish. Now and then a great cormorant would pass the cliff edge, sailing along without a movement of the wings, and sinking from sight with a cry.